Tag: furious gazelle
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Excerpts from “The Years,” a collection of interrelated flash fictions

by Michael Prihoda

The Year of Problems

Our parents have problems.

The man bagging groceries at the local Meijer has problems.

Steven has problems.

Gary has problems.

I think one time you mentioned how the dental hygienist attending the initial cleaning of your front molars referenced her recent, razor-edged divorce, which, I have to say, makes me think she has a host of nearly illimitable problems.

Joanna has problems.

The last barista I ordered a drink from (please, not Starbucks; whatever I am I am not that) didn’t pull the ristretto correctly and I tasted the off-ness in every sip, probably would have enjoyed the drink otherwise, but just knowing the mess-up, the goof, was enough to put me off from the whole coffee drinking enterprise but then again I didn’t go up and complain, realizing somewhere subconsciously that I should have ordered a Gibraltar or even a café miel because at least the honey would take the edge from whatever mistake could have been made (excepting, of course, an over-eager dusting of cinnamon, which definitely happened once, though I let it slide because the barista that time was cute and yeah, standing, waiting for my drink, I thought about how exactly I might tip her head just so to meet my lips and how much tongue I would use and if she wore chapstick/lip gloss what kind it might be and if that would somehow be a turn-on or else perversely anti-arousing because it magically reverberated with the same natural flavors in my body wash, purchased from the health store down the road from the coffee bar where they faulted my ristretto). All of this meaning the barista who served me my ristretto has, at least, a singular problem.

Dadaism Revisited

Gobs of various colors have burned themselves into my retinas. So that red blinks white and white blinks black. I stood so long and stared the way children stare at light bulbs. Bespeckled everything I saw for hours afterward. Jackson Pollock, an egoist with an unnatural ability to paint feeling. The way colors feel. Like taking a beautiful natural rainbow, unraveling, mangling, cutting it into bits and throwing it into a blender. It’s the art that we are sure we had created in some fit of rage in kindergarten. When all you needed was a grey crayon for your elephant.

Angry at the injustice of it all, you scribbled frantically in every other color, especially red. Maybe you even went over to the other tables and scribbled on the other classmates drawings, no one could stop you. Or when you were painting the walls around the ceiling and the phone rang; a startled splatter of paint that made it beyond the masking tape barrier, you stared at it for a split second, you contemplated signing just under it: “Jackson Pollock was here” and the date but instead go out to buy a gallon of ceiling white. Continue reading

An Afternoon in Brooklyn

by Joseph Giordano

There was a knock on the door, and I froze like the flash of a strobe. My Glock was on the metal-top kitchen table, and the apartment entrance faced me. I clicked off the whirr of the portable fan. Sweat clung the shirt to my back. I wiped my palms on jeans. I dropped behind a wooden chair and steadied my aim with the seat. My temples throbbed. The wall clock ticked like a metronome. I glanced at the fire escape outside the window. A car honked, tires screeched, and a woman screamed for her kid to get out of the street.

The knock came again. Louder.

Should I shoot through the door? Maybe I had time to shimmy down the fire escape?

Was it a trap? Her voice was calm. I stepped silently to the door and looked through the peephole. The lens stretched her face like a float balloon. She was alone. I slid the Glock into the small of my back and cracked the door.

Mrs. Scaramucci’s flower-patterned housecoat hung down to her calves where elastic hose bunched up around blue-snake veins and tassel-toed slippers. She smelled like damp mold.

“Mrs. Scaramucci, rent isn’t due until the fifteenth of the month.”

She gave me a sly look. “Two men showed up at my door, grande e brutto. The ugly one had a glass eye. They asked for you.” She wallowed in the news.

My gut went queasy, but I kept my face impassive. Beppe Lerma’s nickname was mal occhio after he lost an eye in a bar fight. He baseball batted his opponent into a paraplegic.

I focused on my breathing to slow my heart rate.

Mrs. Scaramucci tilted her head. “I told them nothing; maybe they were tax collectors. If you’re leaving, I want the rent.”

Scaramucci collected rent in cash. Paranoia about an IRS audit kept her from fingering me.

“Mrs. Scaramucci, I’ll pay when it’s due. I’m busy.”

She peered past me. I closed the door and turned the dead bolt.

I went to the front room of the railroad apartment and peeked at the street through the screen. Meat hung in the window of the butcher across the street. A few patrons entered the sawdust-covered floor. The owner of the corner bicycle shop replaced a flat tire. He had greasy hands. A red city bus rumbled down the street. The window glass vibrated, and I smelled diesel fumes. Alternate Side Parking was in effect. Cars had been shifted from the day before. A gray puff of exhaust belched from a black Lincoln I hadn’t seen. Its tinted windows were rolled up, but there were a number of spent cigarette butts on the sidewalk near the driver’s side. My stomach churned acid. Probably Lerma got a hit on my description at the D’Agostino’s where I shopped. Now he and his crew waited to pop me when I came onto the street. Continue reading

Sylvia’s Birthday Party

By Irving A. Greenfield

She would soon be sixty and decided weeks before the event to make a birthday party for herself. Sure, or afraid, that there wouldn’t be too many birthdays in her future she planned this one with meticulous care. The guest list – if it could be called that – wasn’t long. She always had a problem with friends. Being a gregarious person, she could make friends easily, but she never had learned how to keep them. So, the list was necessarily narrowed down to members of her immediate family: her mother, her brother Robert and his wife Anne; their two children, Larry and Donald; and her husband, Martin. There was another sister, Rose, a year younger than herself. But they hadn’t spoken to each other for close to eight maybe ten years. She wasn’t good with numbers unless they were related to the cost of item whether it was for clothing or something for the house – an apartment in Astoria, Queens.

Sparklers and Snakes

by Jack Helbig

“There’s another one!” laughs Bonnie. She sits behind me by the window.

“Bad perm.”

“Oh god, look at that one!”

Trish doesn’t say a thing; I notice she’s been very quiet this trip.

It’s the summer of 1975 and I just got my license last April. This is my first summer driving, and since my sister has a much busier social life than I do (this was the summer I discovered I had no friends) I have become her de facto chauffeur. The three of them squish together in the back seat of our second car, a 1964 VW bug.

We pull over onto the grass by the side of the road and I jump out, planning to open the door and bow theatrically as they emerge. I have done this before. I think it makes me seem kind of European and elegant, but it drives my sister crazy. “Cameron, we can do it.” she says, pushing the seat forward the moment we stop, reaching for the door handle from the back seat.

By the time I got around the car, Bonnie is scooching out of the seat, butt first. I don’t want to look like I want to watch this, so I turn around and look at the fireworks stands.

There were three of them. Set up under tents at the Shell Station, at the Clark Station, and next to the Hager Farms farm stand. This is the year before the bicentennial, so things are not over the top patriotic yet. But there is a large American flag flapping at the Shell Station. Under it on the pole is a Missouri state flag and a black P.O.W./M.I.A “You are not forgotten.” flag. The flag at the Hager Farms farm stand is smaller, but there are four of them, stuck in the ground at each corner of the tent. In front of the Clark station, there is a huge fiberglass man, originally Paul Bunyan, with a beard, stocking cap, and overalls, but his overalls and cap had been given red and white stripes and his beard was painted white. Uncle Sam as lumberjack.

Sister Holly

by Alex Haber

At the far end of our street there is a cul-de-sac, a dead end of houses removed from our proper neighborhood. We gather in the woods behind the cul-de-sac in a clubhouse built at the top of a tree, titled with an old bar sign one of us stole from the rubble of a nearby fire: The Rusty Nail.

From our clubhouse we can see into the houses of the cul-de-sac. Two of the properties are owned by old hags, the ancient Agmon sisters, whose rundown houses face each other across the street. Other than to investigate the strange whirring noises that come from their bedrooms at night, we’ve had no reasons to study them.

The third house, painted pale yellow so that it stands out from the plain white others, and with large, uncurtained windows, belongs to Sister Holly. Sister Holly is the youngest nun we’ve ever seen – all of us students at the Catholic boys’ high school. She must be just a few years older than us, and she doesn’t teach, as far as we know. Each day she leaves her house in full uniform, heading to an unknown place: a convent in the city, we imagine, or some other queer religious institute. Our parents call her Sister Holly – the italics a tone in their voices – when referencing her.

“Poor Mary Miller,” says my mother to my aunt one evening at the kitchen table. Across the room my father sits in his usual chair, whittling a piece of wood into some sort of knick-knack. “That daughter of hers is going to end up in the family way.”

“A disciple of Sister Holly,” says my aunt.

Our street is full of these sayings, these innuendos, though we’ve never seen anyone at the pale yellow house but its owner. In the clubhouse we share our findings, trying to understand the young nun.

“Ms. Hamel said she’s had an abortion.”

“Who’s Ms. Hamel?”

“She works at the clinic.”

“You’ve never been to any clinic.”

“She got expelled from the convent. That’s why she can’t teach in town.”

Birthright

Mr. Weaver lost his hat. He felt it tumble backwards down his cranium and disappear into the dark. “Must have been an owl,” he muttered.

Motley grunted and drove the horse on. The reins jingled in his pale hands.

Mr. Weaver’s head felt cool. A harsh, autumn wind with an early hint of winter’s chill rushed his hair. He feared the worst for his appearance. He squinted at the night’s impenetrable black veil, thinking he saw little shapes flitting about in the corners of his vision. Mr. Weaver cleared his throat. “How much further?”

Motley mumbled something. He covered his eyes with a ragged hand, his lips moving inaudibly. His head swayed from shoulder to shoulder with each bump of the carriage. “Ten minutes more, I should think,” he said. He tugged at his collar.